A polarity calculation approach for lexicon-based Turkish sentiment analysis

Abstract

Sentiment analysis attempts to resolve the senses or emotions that a writer or speaker intends to send across tothe people about an object or event. It generally uses natural language processing and/or artificial intelligence techniquesfor processing electronic documents and mining the opinion specified in the content. In recent years, researchers haveconducted many successful sentiment analysis studies for the English language which consider many words and wordgroups that set emotion polarities arising from the English grammar structure, and then use datasets to test theirperformance. However, there are only a limited number of studies for the Turkish language, and these studies have lowerperformance results compared to those studies for English. The reasons for this can be incorrect translation of datasetsfrom English into Turkish and ignoring the special grammar structures in the latter. In this study, special Turkish wordsand linguistic constructs which affect the polarity of a sentence are determined with the aid of a Turkish linguist, and anappropriate lexicon-based polarity determination and calculation approach is introduced for this language. The proposedmethodology is tested using different datasets collected from Twitter, and the test results show that the proposed systemachieves better accuracy than the previously developed lexical-based sentiment analysis systems for Turkish. The authorsconclude that especially analysis of word groups increases the overall performance of the system significantly.